The card's core is clocked to 500MHz, the GDDR 3 memory - of which there's 128MB, operating across a 128-bit bus, to an effective 900MHz (actually 450MHz).

The 110nm 6600 chip contains eight parallel pixel processing pipelines and three vertex engines for a fill rate of 4bn texels per second and 375m vertices per second.

Nvidia is also preparing an AGP version of the standard 6600 chip, clocked at 300MHz, with effective DDR memory speeds of 500-550MHz.

There's also a PCI Express version of the AGP-based GeForce 6800 LE on the way. It's clocked at 325MHz, with its DDR memory running at an effective 600MHz across a 256-bit bus. It contains eight pixel pipelines and four vertex units. Like the 6600 AGP, the 6800LE supports PureVideo, Nvidia's HDTV engine. It also supports SLI.